The children of colonial psychoanalysis - chapter 13 part 1

Since Freud first formulated his theories a century ago,
practitioners and enthusiasts have considered psychoanalysis to be more than merely
a humane therapeutic treatment for psychiatric disorders. Freudian interpretations
have been variously applied to entities as diverse as corporations, nations, and religious
traditions. In a study of the use of psychoanalysis in colonial India,
Christiane Hartnack wrote:

“Beyond healing individuals, [psychoanalysts] also hoped to
provide an understanding of complex and threatening cultural phenomena that would
be a first step towards the solution of social problems”.

Chapter 18 of this volume describes how non-Whites, or people of
color, were often depicted as untamed, innocent children, whom white Americans
could benevolently train to become civilized and socialized. During different phases of America’s history, different
peoples were identified as the savage de jour, such as Native Americans, Mexicans,
Chinese, and Filipinos, including today’s ‘illegal aliens’.By the late
nineteenth century, such blatant racism was sugarcoated with an icing of ‘race
sciences’.Totem and Taboo: Resemblances Between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics applied psychoanalysis to the fields of archeology,
anthropology, and the study of religion. Published by Freud in 1913, it
provided yet another quasi-scientific theoretical veneer, lending credibility
to such ideas as eugenics.

Freud classified cultures and societies based on developmental schema.
Natives or primitives were likened to children through a twofold process.
First, different cultures of the world were classified into a hierarchical
model of developmental stages of historical and cultural progress. Since Europeans formulated the scale, naturally they placed
themselves at the top. Secondly, these societal
stages were seen as an externalization of individual, biological development.
Therefore, due to their culture’s position on
the scale, it was scientifically justified to classify any individual belonging
to a non-European culture as being inferior to Whites. This assumption was amplified if the nation or culture
of the native had been colonized, because that label came with an automatic and
morally convenient justification of being in need of Western tutelage.

In the context of applied psychoanalysis,
when Abrahamic monotheism is placed at the apex of religious hierarchy or
cultural potential—as it has been for millennia of Eurocentric thinking—then both
dharmic thought and the polytheistic lens through which Hinduism is perceived,
by many outsiders, become fertile and exotic fields for psychoanalytic searches
dredging for pathologies.

Post-modern deconstruction theories have legitimized analyses
that dislocate symbols from their sources, making them available for ‘slippery’
meanings that are often antithetical to the tradition and irrelevant to
mutually understood referents. (For more on this, please read page 133, chapter 13)

Freud’s theories have been applied to Indic themes since the
early twentieth century. Hartnack explains how two British
officers in the colonial army, Owen Berkeley-Hill and C.D. Daly, were inspired
by reading Freud’s theories in psychoanalytical journals such as Imago and
the International Journal of
Psychoanalysis. On this basis, they “attempted to
analyze and interpret some of those elements of Indian culture, religion,
sexuality and politics that they apparently found strange, puzzling, uncanny or
even frightening”. Hartnack adds that “psychoanalytical
interpretations of Hindu religious rituals” were particularly fascinated by “the
imagery of Kali”.

Under the subtitle, Hindu as the White Man’s Burden, Hartnack describes the early use of psychoanalysis
in the Indian context. Hartnack mentions Berkeley-Hill’s 1921 essay, The Anal-Erotic Factor in the Religion, Philosophy
and Character of the Hindus,
published in the

International Journal of Psychoanalysis:

In this work, [Berkeley-Hill] gave a range of examples of what
he considered to be a sublimation of, or reaction formations against, anal-erotic
impulses among Hindus. According to him, reverence for deities such as Agni,
Indra and Surya shows anal-erotic fixations, as these deities are associated
with passing enormous amounts of wind. The singing chants of classic Hindu liturgies
also appeared to him to be related to the same flatus complex. He further
pointed to classic Vedic texts that indicate a preoccupation with
control over the sphincter muscles, and discussed hatha yoga in this respect ‘breath
exercises are really efforts to direct flatus into a most elaborate quasi-philosophical system’.

In other words, the intention of a Hindu, while chanting
mantras, is to pass wind as an expression of reverence for Agni, Indra, or
Surya—the hot air presumably being indicative of the nature of Hindu devotion. In
this colonial version of the use of applied psychoanalysis in the interpretation
of Hinduism, breathing exercises such as pranayama are relegated
to elaborate exercises in passing gas. The
earliest use of psychoanalysis to interpret Hinduism focused almost exclusively
on flatulence, in all its audible forms. Such early psychoanalytical approaches
were Eurocentric, phallocentric, and profoundly naïve.

Freud viewed all human possibility through the lenses of the
first (anal) and the second (procreative) chakras. In contrast, Indic thought aims
to put the focus on higher chakras that represent more elevated or evolved
states of consciousness. Moreover, Freud encouraged the

application of these anal-oriented perspectives to entire
societies, not just individuals. (For more on Freud’s views, please read page 134 and
135, chapter 13)

The psychoanalytic discipline’s traditional purpose is a
methodology through which a trained analyst and his or her paying patient
discuss the patient’s problems and work together to ameliorate neuroses by analyzing
dreams and childhood experiences. There
is a strong, peer enforced, ethical covenant between the two which the
psychoanalyst only violates at great professional peril.However, when
a psychoanalyst—trained or untrained—embarks on an ethnographic study of an
entire social unit or civilization, rather than an individual, he or she is dealing with many layers of abstraction—each one of
which can be manipulated at will.Instead of the analyst working with
the patient to achieve optimum mental health, the ethnographer simply records
data obtained through paid or unpaid native informants and interprets the alien culture based on ad hoc use of psychoanalytic theories.
Such imagined data is
exemplified by Kripal, and carelessly woven into Courtright’s work on Ganesha. The native informant’s role is not as an equal who
should be accorded the dignity of being a partner in the search for
understanding. Ultimately, the subject has no
role in shaping the context, much less a right to critique the final product of
the research. The very idea of such ownership is repugnant to most contemporary researchers.

Susantha Goonatilake in his book, Anthropologizing Sri Lanka: A Eurocentric
Misadventure, points out that it is
doubtful if any of the informants will read their own ethnographies because
they are usually only published in European languages. Hence, the informers do
not even get a chance to talk back. Certainly, there is no chance of giving a
rejoinder. Ethnographic psychoanalysis may
claim to enhance the understanding of non-Western cultures, but in actuality,
it simply imposes Eurocentric constructs to describe the Other.

Hinduism as Flatulence

Hartnack’s description of early attempts to use psychoanalysis
as a tool to interpret Hinduism exposes stark examples of abusive scholarship:

Berkeley-Hill further claimed that the essence of the notion of atman is
that in Brahmanism, the flatus complex masquerades as a metaphysical spirit.
What he saw as the excessive ritualism of

Brahmanism is also an indication of classical
pedantic-compulsive, anal-erotic components. To prove this point, he gave
detailed descriptions of repetitive elements in Brahmanic rituals, for example eighteen
rules for answering the call of nature, and nine for cleaning the teeth.
Berkeley-Hill also discussed the enormous units of time in Hindu myths, e.g.,
thousands of golden ages, millions of years within each yuga,
and the extremely high numbers associated with deities, such as ten million royal deities. He saw in this propensity to juggle with large arithmetical
quantities an expression of the moulding capacities characteristic of early
anal activities.

Thus, as explained in Chapter 8, David White’s reduction of
Tantra to a weird sex-cult of hypocritical Hindus consuming each other’s sexual
fluids is based on the colonial-era psychoanalytical precedents. It is a
genuine coin of the colonial regime.

Not surprisingly, quite a few colonialists had serious cases of
Kali-phobia. Hartnack wrote:

Daly pointed out that Kali is worshipped as the all-embracing mother,
but that she is also considered to be the goddess of death, destruction, fear,
night and chaos, as well as the goddess of cholera and of anti- and asocial
groups, such as thieves and prostitutes, the symbol of cemeteries, the
destroyer of time—in short, the source of all evil. (For more
on Daly’s iconographic representation of Kali, please read page 136 and 137,
chapter 13)

This image of the Hindu Goddess as a bloodthirsty, phallic being
is faithfully echoed to this day. In Caldwell’s description, Kali is “first of
all, a phallic being, the mother with a penis . . . she is the bloodied image
of the castrating and menstruating (thus castrating) female . . . ”

Of course Caldwell ‘updates’ the thesis by attributing newly
fashionable homosexual psychopathologies to Hindus who worship the Goddess. Her stated ambition is to “show that themes of eroticism
and aggression in the mythology are male transsexual fantasies reflecting
intense preoedipal fixation on the mother’s body and expressing conflicts over primary
feminine identity”.

Hindus are thereby classified as a community dominated by obsessive
compulsive traits. Hinduism is seen as a societal neurosis, or perhaps a
collective pathology exemplified by the Goddess Kali. Among today’s scholars,
Doniger brings it home with her sweeping statements to the press about ‘bloodthirsty’ goddesses and ‘inverse ratios’
between worship of the Goddess and the status of women in Hindu society. Describing
this strategically implemented use of psychoanalysis from a particularly
colonial point of view, Hartnack wrote:

Daly pointed out that, whereas with regard to Ireland, one might
understand a favorable identification with a lovely virgin, in India the
identification was with the dreadful Kali, which seemed perverse to him. He
therefore considered the Hindus’ behaviour to be beyond even the broadest
margins of normality and summarized his analysis of revolutionary tendencies
with the following words: ‘we have a psychology which differs considerably from
the European, its

equivalent with us being found only in pathological cases. They are
a race who fail in their rebellion against the father and as a result of this
failure adopt a feminine role with feminine character traits. There results, so to speak, a split in the male
personality, the aggressive component undergoing repression, which accounts for
the childlike and feminine character traits of the Hindu as a whole, and the
fact that they thrive only under very firm and kindly administration, but if
allowed latitude in their rebellious tendencies are quick to take advantage of
it.

Handy political uses of psychology are still uppermost in the
minds of many Western researchers in dealing with Indians, as can be seen from
Caldwell’s call to psychoanalyze Hindu culture as a whole. For Doniger, too,
this overwhelming desire to discredit any political identity for Hindus—leads
to her eager approval of David White’s reductionist thesis on Tantra, not
because she finds his evidence entirely convincing—she doesn’t—but because of
the immense political and civilizational value of degrading uppity Hindus and
taking them down a notch or two. Both
Daly and Doniger seem to share a common anxiety about putting the Hindus in
their proper place, lest their rebellious tendencies threaten the world order
and/or academic stability.

Hartnack explains that the dominant view in Europe at the Hartnack
explains that the dominant view in Europe at the time was a commonly held
theory, derived from Enlightenment thought,

that the “development of the individual is structured according
to the development of mankind”. She
points out that Freud also adhered to this perspective. Results of this theory were racial sciences, such as eugenics
in the nineteenth century, which led to institutional discrimination in America
and Europe. (For more on this, please read page 138, chapter 13)

Scholars whose work have recently been critiqued by the diaspora
apply this 1920s’ era reasoning to all Hindus, seeing them as stuck in infantilism
and incapable of understanding sophisticated jargon.

While defending Kripal’s creative interpretation of homoerotica,
Caldwell suggests to her fellow RISA researchers, that they should contextualize
the ‘distorted masculinity’ of Hindu culture, and the ‘confused sexuality’ of
the Hindu male. She sees this mangling of the male as the catalyst that set off
a highly contested, socially emasculated politicized century of dangerous
nationalistic posturing. Thus what starts as tentative,
poorly evidenced, and speculative research is quickly elevated as a way of
making sense of those dangerous Indians and their psychologically corrosive
culture.

Regarding the article by Berkeley-Hill, The Anal-Erotic Factor in the Religion, Philosophy
and Character of the Hindu, Hartnack
states that “Hindus did not receive [the] article enthusiastically [when] the
original English version . . . was read at the Indian Psychoanalytical Society.
Perhaps what is most discomfiting to the Donigers, Courtrights and other
latter-day Berkeley-Hills is that the Indians of today, particularly in the
diaspora, are not shy or beaten down. They would rather debate these alleged ‘analyses’,
and ask inconvenient questions, than defer them for some future debate.

Hartnack elaborates in terms that could be applied, mutatis mutandis, to the particular school of contemporary scholars
under review in this book:

Though some theory is tagged on to it, the essay remains a conglomeration
of densely presented images and associations, wild ideas, and racist
attributions. Daly freely converted prevalent

psychoanalytical concepts that
explained psychopathological defects of individuals into explanations for all
those aspects of Indian culture that appear strange to Europeans to
substantiate his belief in the European culture’s superiority over Hinduism.

The basic interpretive view of the Judeo-Christian experience is
in total contrast to Hinduism. On

the surface, Freudianism may be able to attach a few untenable
meanings onto Hindu symbols, but the results are unreliable.

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